Nice spot by Will Davies which I’ve only just picked up. A team at Lancaster University looked at better ways for us to organise and retrieve information for shared use, and to do that the researchers investigated how couples catalogue and retrieve their digital photos

“There is a widely held belief that people benefit from working together to remember details of things” for instance, film storylines. However, research has shown that when they try to recall information which they learned individually, the overall amount remembered is less than if the same people were trying on their own. People mentally organize information in different ways, and cues that help one person recall may inhibit another. So retrieving information from computer systems, such as a keyword search in a library catalogue, may be impaired by a mismatch between the user’s mental organization and the cues provided by the system.”

Interesting given the personal vs collective arguments of KM, I thought.